The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [19]
CHAPTER 3
There is an awesome reality to Rent Day. It comes trumpeting, forcing the days before it into a wild scramble. My rent day seemed to come due every other day, and Guy always needed just one more pair of jeans. The clothes I had to have were eternally in the cleaners, and staples disappeared from my kitchen with an alarming regularity.
I could get a job singing, but I didn't have an agent. Harlem theatrical representatives sought light-skinned Cotton Club-type beauties for their traveling revues. Mid-town white agents would only book unknown black entertainers for out-of-town or night gigs, stag parties or smokers. I knew one white New York club owner who had been a loyal friend to me, but with my recently acquired new level of black dignity I refused to go pleading to him for work.
I found a job on my own. The little club on the Lower East Side was a joint where people came when they didn't have any other place to go. There was a long bar, diluted drinks, dinner-plate-sized tables and no dressing rooms (I changed in the women's toilet) and the work itself embarrassed me.
I sang in the club for two miserable months. People I admired were doing important things. Abbey and Max Roach were performing jazz concerts on liberation themes. Lorraine Hansberry had a play on Broadway which told some old truths about the black American Negro family to a new white audience. James Baldwin had the country in his balled fist with The Fire Next Time. Killens' And Then We Heard the Thunder told the uncomfortable facts about black soldiers in a white army. Belafonte included the South African singer Miriam Makeba in his concerts, enlarging his art and in creasing his protest against racial abuse. And I was still singing clever little songs only moderately well. I made the decision to quit show business. Give up the skintight dresses and manicured smiles. The false concern over sentimental lyrics. I would never again work to make people smile inanely and would take on the responsibility of making them think. Now was the time to demonstrate my own seriousness.
Two weeks after my firm decision, I received an offer to appear at the Apollo Theatre, and the idea of rejecting the invitation never occurred to me. The Apollo, in Harlem, was to black entertainers the Met, La Scala and a Royal Command Performance combined. Pearl Bailey, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington had played on that stage.
Frank Schiffman, the manager, sat in the darkened theater listening to rehearsal. Tito Puente's big band with Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria dropped dancing notes in the air like dust particles in a windstorm.
Schiffman sat rigid in the first row. I rehearsed my songs with the band, spurred on by the timbales of Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria's conga. I enlarged on my initial interpretation of the music, singing better than I was usually capable of. Schiffman didn't move or speak until I started to rehearse “Uhuru,” an audience-participation song which I used as an encore.
“No audience participation in the Apollo.” His voice was as rusty as an old iron bar.
“I beg your pardon?” Always get siditty when you're scared, was my policy. “Were you speaking to me?”
“Yeah, no audience participation in the Apollo.”
“But that's my act. I always use ‘Uhuru’ as an encore. The word means freedom in Swahili. Babatunda Olatunje, the great Nigerian drummer, taught it to me—”
“No audience participation—.”
“Is that your policy, Mr. Schiffman? If so …”
A few musicians rustled sheet music; others talked in Spanish.
“It's not a policy. The